After receiving the following e-mail from a now former Republican friend of mine, I realized that the DNC should seriously consider mimicking
After receiving the following e-mail from a now former Republican friend of mine, I realized that the DNC should seriously consider mimicking
So, I thought I was a Republican.
However, today I was prompted to reconsider my position, especially with respect to our current President.
Our current president opposes the right of women to choose to have abortions. I am, albeit reluctantly and with serious moral reservations about what I believe is ethical for people to choose to do, pro-choice. I would not deny women a right of self-determination as regards their health -- I do not think it is morally acceptable to compel someone to bring a child to term if she does not wish to do so.
And so he and I disagree on this point.
Our current president has the distinction of having been the governer of the executingest state in the union. I oppose the death penalty as unnecessary, unjustly applied, and distorting of our judicial system. I have a serious problem with a government being in the business of killing its citizens, and incidentally, it's a really expensive institution the funding of which I would rather see applied to, say, more secure prison conditions.
And so he and I disagree on this point as well.
Our current president believes a constitutional ammendment is in order to prevent homosexuals from achieving legal marriages. I believe our current constitution guarantees the opposite and would see that right formally recognized, that civil marriage should be an institution involving two consenting adults regardless of their sex, gender, or beliefs. I believe ammending the constitution for this point is inappopriate, a waste of political capital, and demonstrative of a fundamentally different vision of appropriate uses of political power.
Another point upon which we disagree.
After much consideration (and those who know me well may be surprised to hear me say this), I have decided that to the extent that it is admissable to do so I retroactively oppose the war in Iraq. I used to be for it. My touchstone was the thought that tortured political prisoners, upon being rescued by the Marines, were unlikely to immediately begin protesting US interventions in their country. I thought that we had (albeit poor) intelligence information prompting an immediate need to intervene in Iraq.
I'm coming to accept that there never was and isn't going to be evidence of WMDs in Iraq, that we were deliberately misled if not lied to on this point. Removing Sadaam from power would have been totally acceptable in my book had the UN, or at least community of nations of similar values, been on board for the idea. Doing so the way we actually did was devisive, unnecessarily poor diplomatically.
I believe that the highest income bracket should be taxed more, at the margin, not less -- I would not favor 90% marginal tax, as that low a marginal incentive to obtain income would be distortional -- but a marginal tax of 60% doesn't sound unreasonable to me. Such a tax is morally justified in that anyone making so much as to be in the highest of tax brackets clearly is doing quite well for herself, and is supported in that success at least in part by the framework of society provided by
government.
I oppose wasting a trillion dollars in going to the moon, and I support correcting the federal budget such that there is a surplus to be applied to the reduction of the national debt.
I oppose building a missile shield against the threat of the past, recognizing that the technology is ill-tested, that at the margin it doesn't make any difference, and that those defense dollars can be better spent.
I oppose legislation that unreasonably abridges the Constitutional rights of citizens against searches, the ill-conceived conversion of the previously restrained Federal Bureau of Investigation into an unrestrained
homeland security entity. There are yet crimes that are not terrorism, and the FBI should continue to address them. I oppose couching all discourse, even that about American education, in terms of "9-11" and "terrorists".
In short, I've just run out of points upon which I can agree with our present president or his party, finding he has worked long and hard to lose my support, and as such I will have no choice but to vote Democrat in
the presidential election.